Stress Testing

Remember that one year when you took too many AP classes in high school and didn’t study for all of them? And how you’d have to go in at the end of the semester and take that final examination to see if you’d be able to carry over that college credit to your freshman year so you didn’t have to take it again as a prereq? And remember how stressful that was? I’m not not talking about that stress test at all.

This is eons later in life when I’m in my career pushing pixels on the frontend and shipping code on the backend. I decided to run a city-based site and then I added more. And more. And more. AND MORE. AAAANNND MOOOOOORE! The worst way to go about it would’ve been to just launch them altogether and see if anything would crash, but here I am eons later in life when I’m a tad smarter, so here are some nuggets of wisdom: 1) track your sites through Google Analytics, 2) launch incrementally while annotating changes, and 3) try to figure out some sort of growth metric while you keep expanding, because that’ll give you your North Star, an estimate of when you’ll need to upgrade anything, before anything crashes.